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Up-to-the Minute PHP News, views and communityen-usTue, 03 Mar 2015 16:52:38 -060030http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/22365http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/22365
The Loosely Coupled podcast has posted their latest episode today - Episode #19, How We Work. Join hosts Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost as they talk about work life, personal life and what tools, processes and techniques they've used during their careers to get the job done.

In this episode Jeff and Matt explore how they go about organizing their work life and our personal lives. They cover the idea of how the process evolves depending on your environment and even your personal inclinations. In 2011, Jeff wrote a blog post about the tools he used back then and realized that it has changed a little but for the most part works for him. They cover some pitfalls of processes that require tickets/stories to be broken down into parts where developers cannot understand what they're doing or why, and how they've learned over time to get to that information. They also talked about learning how to be professionals and defend against situations that would impact your work or your code in negative ways. Finally they touch on Matt's work scheduling experiment which is inspired by the Makers Schedule versus the Managers Schedule and how it has helped him be more productive.

Link: http://looselycoupled.info/blog/2015/02/12/episode-19-how-we-work/]]>Fri, 13 Feb 2015 09:45:50 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/22292http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/22292
The Loosely Coupled podcast, hosted by PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost, has posted their latest episode - Episode 18: Best Practices. In it they talk about "best practices" as it relates to teams and working with other developers.

In this episode Jeff and Matt will talk about their experiences of getting teams moving on good practices. They will cover times when it has been challenging to convince higher-ups the value of doing certain things, all the way to how to go about changing teams by example. This episode is sponsored by our friend, Coderabbi, who is currently on the Wisdom as a Service World Tour 2015.

In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about the idea of establishing and participating in mentoring relationships. As participants in the PHP Mentoring organization or initiative, mentorship is an important part of Jeff's and Matt's lives as developers. The main theme in this episode is that you should find a way to get past your fears and find a way to get involved with mentoring in your community. Along the way they cover some advice based on past experiences of what to expect and how to establish successful relationships.

In this episode, Jeff and Matt talk about the difficult task all developers are continuously faced with: estimation. They cover some examples of times they have found estimation difficult, techniques that have worked for them, and even some advice on how to deal with the stress of estimating incorrectly. Ultimately, estimation is a part of the necessary communication that must happen for a project to be successful.

Link: http://looselycoupled.info/blog/2014/12/19/episode-16-estimation-is-hard/]]>Tue, 23 Dec 2014 09:32:58 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/22072http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/22072
In the latest episode of the Loosely Coupled podcast, Episode #15: Mental Health in the Tech Industry, hosts Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost talk about mental health issues, their own personal experiences with it and some of the work that's being done to help and address it in the industry.

In this episode, Jeff and Matt discuss mental health, a very important and very personal topic. There is a lot of great work being done right now in our industry to bring awareness to issues of mental health including > prompt by EngineYard, Open Sourcing Mental Illness by Ed Finkler, and #HackTheStigma, among others. This discussion talks about our thoughts on the topic in general as well as gets into personal experiences.

In this episode, Jeff and Matt talk about some things they have learned about being remote developers. While both are currently employed as remote developers they have also worked in on-site jobs. This episode is a collection of things that might be different, things to expect, things that might be hard, and, of course, whether you need to wear pants.

Link: http://looselycoupled.info/blog/2014/11/30/episode-14-the-not-so-secret-life-of-remote-developers/]]>Mon, 01 Dec 2014 09:14:55 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/21979http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/21979
The Loosely Coupled podcast has released their latest episode, Episode 13: Job Descriptions and Interviews. Join hosts Matt Frost and Jeff Carouth as they talk about issues around the hiring process (from their experience) and deciphering the language of the job posting.

In this episode Jeff and Matt will talk about how to look at job descriptions and what to expect during interviews for the jobs you really want to have. They will combine their experiences on both sides of the interview room and reminisce about good and bad interview experiences. Interviewing may be stressful, but it's how you advance your career.

Link: http://looselycoupled.info/blog/2014/11/14/episode-13-job-descriptions-and-interviews/]]>Mon, 17 Nov 2014 09:19:36 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/21837http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/21837
The Loosely Coupled podcast, with hosts and PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost, has released their latest episode: Episode 12: Elephpantitus.

In this episode Jeff and Matt finally discover the mystery of the Trello card "Elephpantitus" and attempt to cover how important or how unimportant it is to diversify your programming background within a given language community. Perhaps it's a good idea to focus on being a PHP developer rather than a WordPress developer or a Magento developer, or maybe it isn't. This episode could be titled Maybe since they weren't really sure which way to lean starting out.

Link: http://looselycoupled.info/blog/2014/10/14/episode-12-elephpantitus/]]>Thu, 16 Oct 2014 09:28:15 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/21747http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/21747
The Loosely Coupled podcast has posted their latest episode today - Episode #11, I Learnded Goodly. Hosts Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost talk from some of their own experience when it comes to learning (and teaching) as developers.

In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about how we teach and how we learn as developers. Often subjects such as testing or object-oriented programming are taught in ways that could be considered the most difficult way possible. This episode covers some advice about how teach these types of subjects in an accessible way and, even better, how to go about learning difficult subjects.

Link: http://looselycoupled.info/blog/2014/09/23/episode-11-i-learnded-goodly/]]>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 11:48:26 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/21631http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/21631
The Loosely Coupled podcast has released their latest episode: #10, Titles and Classifications. In this episode hosts Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost discuss these two topics and how they effect one's career.

In this episode Jeff and Matt continue their conversation about careers by discussing their thoughts on titles and classifications of developers. If you've ever asked "what is a senior developer?" or even "am I a senior developer?" this episode is for you.